by Jennifer Norman, Math Interventionist, WA:
I am in my second year as a math interventionist at Adams Elementary in the Yakima School District. This is my 11th year teaching and my first year using TenMarks Math. After hearing about TenMarks Math over the summer, I was intrigued at everything that TenMarks Math had to offer. As a team, we quickly decided it would be best if I became the point person for TenMarks Math in my building.
In this role, I worked with teachers to create tracks based on the curricula, to assign classwork and assessments to students based on the current standards they were teaching, and to monitor how the classes are doing. One of the first things that we decided to do was to give students an assessment from their previous grade level. Since they were all new to TenMarks Math, I thought that this would be a perfect way to uncover any holes or gaps. When students completed the assessment, we were able to assign recommendations as personal work for all students with a simple click of the mouse.
Around October, I realized that we had to get more organized in our approach. I spent an afternoon looking through our math curricula foundational standards and the focus standards for each module in grades 3-5. Cross-referencing this list and the module’s end-of-unit exams, I was able to determine which three standards I wanted to pre- and post-test for each grade level. I noticed that most of the end-of-unit exams focused on three main standards. On TenMarks Math, a three-standard level assessment has 18 questions, allowing students to get through the assessment fairly quickly.
To implement, I now follow these steps:
1. Pre-test when the classrooms are giving their mid-module exams in class. I then view the recommendations to determine which assignments I will assign.
2. Assign any of the review recommendations; this fills any “holes” the students may have before they actually get the teaching piece from their classroom teacher.
3. Once the class has been learning the content in their homerooms for about two weeks, I assign the grade-level “practice” work. Students will have both their “review” work and their “practice” work under their class assignments. If I want them to work on a specific assignment set, I will tell students to “work on the green monster,” for example. At this point, I will also assign any students that have scored high on the pre-test the “challenge” work.
4. A week after classroom teachers give their end-of-module assessment, I give the post-test.
While I know that not all school sites will have a point person, this framework could be implemented easily with any classroom teacher. So far, this “cycle” has worked really well for the teachers at Adams Elementary. Students are excited about using TenMarks Math and our school is seeing growth in their mathematics data. Most importantly, students who never thought they could do math are succeeding!
Do you have other suggestions to successfully implement TenMarks Math in your school or classroom? Share with us in our teacher communities on Facebook and Twitter!
